The role Rob Lowe compared to an unhealthy relationship: “I did not have a good experience”
You might well think that the concept of being ‘cancelled’ is a relatively new phenomenon, but it has actually been going on for years, in fact, a good example of it was what happened to Rob Lowe just a few years after he’d burst onto the scene as a member of the Brat Pack with Demi Moore and Emilio Estevez.
They were the brightest young things in Hollywood circa 1985, thanks to movies like St Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night, but Lowe would quickly run into issues in a big way, thanks to a sex tape scandal, the details of which are… not great, it has to be said. Lowe had only experienced about three years of life as an A-lister, and it was about to get turned upside down.
He didn’t make another movie for a full two years, and when he did, it was a flop. It took a further two years after that for Lowe to have a hit, and when it came, it was thanks to a role that he played note-perfectly as a slick, conceited yuppie in Wayne’s World. That comedy was a global smash and seemed to go some way to repairing the public’s perception of the actor, although he continued to struggle to get anything like the profile he’d previously had.
Over the next decade, Lowe featured in a series of straight-to-video movies until he decided to go from the big screen to the small and signed up for Aaron Sorkin’s White House drama The West Wing in 1999. He played Sam Seaborn, the Deputy Communications Director in the show and did it for four successful seasons, picking up two Golden Globe nominations in the first two years.
But in the past couple of years, Lowe has said that his time on the show up until 2003 was anything but enjoyable, and that leaving the HBO production was the best thing he ever did. He told the Podcrushed podcast that his stories about what life was like behind the scenes would: “Make your hair stand up, and there’s some of them I wrote.”
Continuing, “I shared some of them in my book, but I purposely didn’t share half of the other ones because it would make the people involved look so bad that I didn’t want to do it to them. So, I did not have a good experience.”
Although he returned to the show twice to film guest spots in 2006 and 2020, he likened his years on The West Wing to an unhealthy relationship, including those experienced by his adult children, adding: “All the things that people would say about making The West Wing, to me – ‘It’s so popular, it’s so amazing, it must be amazing,’ but I know what it’s like, and if I couldn’t walk away from it, then how could I empower my kids to walk away from it?”
Despite that, Lowe continued to do his best work in television rather than movies, including the hit comedy Parks and Recreation, which he appeared in over four seasons from 2010 and another Golden Globe nomination for Behind the Candelabra, a comedy about the flamboyant pianist Liberace.
Lowe now has a new comedy film coming out called The Musical, alongside Community star Gillian Jacobs, and a TV show about a sports talk show host called The Ram.
